Absurd Patent of the Day

…Apple has been awarded a patent on wedge-shaped computers. Once again it is difficult to see why this sort of competition-stifling government-enforced monopoly would be beneficial to the overall cause of innovation. It’s absolutely true that the record should reflect the fact that Apple made wedge-shaped computers popular and the new wave of Ultrabooks are slightly lame imitators. But we progress as a society because of imitators! People come up with good ideas and then those ideas spread.

(Contra the Verge, “ultrabooks” need only beware if they’re simple clones of the MBA’s distinctive wedge. Not if they’re just “really thin” or “made of aluminum” or the like.

We do, indeed, progress because imitators reduce costs … and they can do so after the patent expires, or by imitating the utility aspect of the MBA [small, light, SSD] rather than its aesthetic.

I am sure there exists someone, somewhere who both assured us that “Ultrabooks aren’t just copies of the MBA” and is also furious about this patent because it prevents them from doing so without paying Apple. I mock that person.)

+1 good spot. No further comments necessary, pro or con, unless you are against trademarks and trade dress. As for “good ideas” let the marketplace decide: if the patent is no good it will never be litigated and die a quiet death. Last I checked the Patent Office has a drawer full of “perpetual motion machine” patents.

Since I’m in favor of trademark, I guess I have to be in favor of trade dress. But design patents? They’re completely different from utility patents, but they also seem pretty different from trade dress.

Giving “Ridiculous patent” the name “Design patent” doesn’t help (except to show that Design==Ridiculous is becoming become a standard part of the language). If they want a trademark, they should have a trademark.

The whole point of patents is that they are broader, that they can catch people who are doing something similar and not the same. But on the other hand patents are supposed to reward some substantial advance in human ingenuity, I don’t see how making a computer wedge shaped makes the grade.

As for “good ideas” let the marketplace decide: if the patent is no good it will never be litigated and die a quiet death.

What?

Last I checked the Patent Office has a drawer full of “perpetual motion machine” patents.

The “wedge” shape is purely functional. Almost every modern laptop and every modern keyboard is higher in the back than the front to accommodate typing. I’m looking down now at a keyboard on a five year old laptop that is slanted down toward me, and there ain’t no apple on the back of the screen.

If there is a laptop predating Apple that truly has this wedge shape, I have not seen it. Most are closer to an even thickness than they are to a wedge and have only a slight angle.

I do think the patent situation has gotten ridiculous, but I am not completely sold on this as an example of that. This is a design patent, and it seems that it really is a distinctive design. It is not just the obvious way everyone would do it; significant engineering work was required to relocate all of the components in order to create this shape.

In order to make the front that thin, they would have had to change the location of some components, compared to most laptops. A number of technical decisions they made, such as permanently soldering the RAM to the board and using a custom-engineered, smaller version of the core 2 duo processor, were likely related to making everything fit in this package.

“this is a design patent, therefore engineering work is irrelevant.”

I understand what the design patent covers. My point was that this shape was a design choice from the beginning, not just what you get when you put everything together in the most obvious way.

I am staring at a stack of older Apple laptops, and they are NOT wedge shaped. They were uniform thickness front to back. The first wedge shaped laptop I ever saw was the early, VERY THIN Sony Viao in 2000n(P3 at 750 MHz). What portable, wedge shaped PowerBook did Apple have at that time? I believe that was the black G3 era, the Pizmo and Wallstreet PowerBooks, and they were not wedge shaped. I am holding one right now.

Actually, the scope of this patent appears to be quite broad.
Any substantially similar (ie wedge shaped) notebook device is likely to infringe – though of course quite what ‘substantially similar’ means in this case is also likely to be litigated.

Utterly ridiculous! They have patented a product SHAPE, not a distinctive design that amounts to a product recognition feature. The wedge shape is a FUNCTIONAL design feature which is why keyboards have little legs to tilt them up in the back.

It’s like patenting the angle of the back of a chair relative to its seat. Geez, why didn’t someone patent the rectangular screen shape?

Hell, why doesn’t somebody patent a glove, or a shoe or even a PAIR of shoes.

Tomorrow I patent a ball that is oblong with somewhat pointy ends, sorta like a football…no, exactly like a football.

The Disney corporation should sue Apple over their logo. I saw it first in Snow White.

Well, obviously all that stuff already exists, so it can’t be patented now. If you invent a chair that is shaped differently from all previous chairs, however, I’m pretty sure you will be able to get a design patent for it.

You and Dell and HP and whoever else copies Apple on a fairly regular basis, seem to think that these folks in Cupertine are running a non for profit operation to provide the rest of the lazyass world of tech with free methods to enrich themselves without any leg work to show for it. Why do you defend the dumb who are incapable of coming up with anything even remotely different from what Apple does? Is that how you make your living?

Apple might be on the cutting edge of fad and fashion, but not on product specs. They are usually the LAST movers in better displays, more memory, higher processing speeds and, oh yeah, Flash support. Their computers and phones are overpriced and underequipped. Their flaws are underreported. Spend an hour in an AT&T store and you’ll probably see a half dozen people with shattered iPhone screens.

Their competitive advantage is solidified with their proprietary operating system, hardware built to suit it, and a cult like fan base. They should stick with that business model instead of adopted Kodak’s profit model of patent infringement revenue.

Toshiba developed an ultra lightweight laptop long before Apple. The Air wasn’t the first computer to use flash memory. Only recently did the Macbooks add backlit keyboards. Samsung makes major components for the iPad.

The next iPhone will have what? A bigger screen you say? Whose idea was that?

Don’t confuse religious fervor for innovation. Steve Jobs could have patented his farts and sold them to fanboyz.

No no no, this has nothing to do with religion! At all. If Apple is so frivolous and Toshiba is so great and google worked on Android before the iPhone and all the rest of this argument, how come everything from hardware to software looks almost exactly like Apple’s ? Explain to me if every other company and it’s brother are greater how come nobody buys their stuff. Who cares about specs. Everyone’s favorite hobby is to brag about how many cores are in their phone’s processors. When in fact it does not matter one bit. Nokia has a single core in their phone which works pretty well. This is a nonsical path that Apple was incredibly wise not to travel. I am not a tech geek, but I have a very busy professional and personal life and I want electronics that I can do things with not do things to all day long. Apple understands this and gives people what they need not what it as a company can brag about. And people buy what works. If all these other products were more useful, they would have been more popular , so enough with the BS about specs.

Oh please! The Cult of Apple is so apparent I’m waiting for them to declare a religious holiday, and your ignorant devotion is more evidence of brainwashing.

Where do you get off saying that “nobody buys their stuff”? Apple took over the top spot of mobile computer sales last year IF AND ONLY IF you count iPads. 15 million of their 20 million mobile devices sold were iPads.

HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo EACH sold more laptops than Apple.

In 2011, when the iPhone 4 and 4S made their big debuts on other networks and the iPhone 3 was still selling, Apple sold 89 million phones. Nokia sold 422 million phones and Samsung sold 315 million phones that year.

I’m not putting down Apple for quality or aesthetics, but there is no question they are over-priced because of the slobbering love affair that people like you have with anything sporting their logo. Frankly, the only two things I have against Apple are 1) their price and 2) PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

I can imagine you really hating people like me who uncover your belony like counting Apple’s 89 mil smart phones with Samsung’s and Nokia’s 315 feature phone sales. Nice! Apple’s products are worth their price because people can use them for many years. They don’t become obsolete as fast as other products. All their IOS gadgets for example, get the most recent updates as soon as they are available. So I expect my first gen iPad that I got in 2010 to get the IOS6 whenever it is available. Android phones running the latest version of Android that came out 7 months ago : 7%. The rest? Running the 2009 versions of software. Why? Because the newer version is incompatible with most hardware? I.e obsolete already. Most of these hardware PC makers are selling to enterprise where people are forced to use windows based systems, not choosing based on quality or appeal. But the interesting part is why are they imitating Apple if their business is thriving? That’s what I want to know. You are deluding your self by saying ignorant devotion. Devotionis not even the right or honest description here. And status and all that have nothing nothing to do with why people stick with Apple. Loyalty yes. getting stuff that is dependable and adaptable that is why people stick with Apple. And my own experience is that they treat me right. I have been using Apple computers since 2002. No one in customer service or the genus bar every made me feel stupid when I come with problems or needing help setting up stuff. You know this counts! And as for the larger phone bit, they have to do it to accommodate a battery large enough to support 4G LTE in addition to the high resolution display on the iPhone.

The steering wheel seems mundane now, but it was a true innovation in 1894. It is hard to see why this would not be patentable, unless you believe their should be no patents for anything.

If that had happened, someone would have made money on licensing and/or a lot of cars would have continued to use tillers until the patent expired in the early 1900’s. Not that big of a deal. It would have expired around the time cars became a mass-market product.

I fail to see how this passes the obviousness test that patents are supposed to face before baing passed. For that matter I find it hard to believe that there isn’t any sort of prior art for a laptop that is thicker in the rear than it is in the front.

Sadly though, this sort of thing is par for the course for the sad, broken joke that the patent system has become. It would be funny if it wasnt such a massive waste of resources and huge impediment to a free and competitive market.

Design patent or not, the concept presented is far too generic. This is the sort of thing that’s simply a USPTO-approved green light for Apple’s IP lawyers to harass anybody producing any products that are even remotely similar in *any* way to the design patent.

Perhaps if someone set this patented invention up outside Apple’s IP HQ every time they tried pulling stuff like this, they might get a clue….

Design patents are much more vulnerable to prior art than utility patents. Even appearing in fiction counts. You couldn’t get a design patent for the 3D gloves from Minority Report because the movie itself counts as prior art.

Tyler would start a lobbying effort to extend the benefit to economics professors whose first name begins with “T.” Then other departments would be up in arms, lobbying to include their “T” professors in the bounty.

But that would only be the beginning. Soon other letters would be lobbying to be included. And other professions. Eventually, there would also be lobbying to include non-professionals, and then unemployed. Everybody would want a piece of the pie.

The design patent does not extend to the functional though all the examples attempting to make this patent seem absurd rely on this idea. It limits the use of a new ornamental feature by others only to the extent that the use is so similar to the patented design that customers would be deceived into buying the infringing product believing it to be the patented design. In making this determination, the similarities of design that arise simply from common function considerations have to be dispensed with.

There is nothing prima facie absurd about this patent, though there is about the confused outrage it is evoking.

The allocation of patent rights between the government and its employees is covered by Executive Order 10096. Unlike private industry, government employees do not have employment contracts. The order has been in effect since 1950 and was created to provide a uniform method of allocating patent rights between the agencies and their employees. Most of the patents owned by the government are obtained under the provisions of this order. The main section of the executive order provides that the government shall obtain all rights to any invention made by an employee if any one of the following conditions applies: the invention is made during working hours; the invention is made using either government facilities, equipment, etc., or is made with the help of another government employee who is on official duty; or the invention relates to the official duties of the inventor.

In the 1980s, someone noticed that government was really, really bad at capitalism, possibly because Communism was collapsing around that time. So they made it easier for organizations to get patent rights when using government funding.

You can either let private business temporarily make money off gov’t-funded research (which is more or less the point of gov’t funding of research), you can have the gov’t attempt to productize patents itself using the same skill with which it runs the Post Office and invests in Solyndra, or you can have gov’t not fund research because someone might make money off of it.

I mean, would Apple really be less likely to invent a wedge-shaped laptop if there was not patent protection for it?

Surely the fact that they’ll sell more stuff due to their better design (assuming it’s indeed better) during the 6-12 months that it will take for someone else to bring the same design to market is enough incentive given the insignificant R&D costs, no?

I guess one of the advantages of dealing with computers since the late 70’s (and i’m under-50) is knowing their history. Anyone who thinks the “wedge” is unique should google the Sinclair ZX-81 (circa 1981). Beats the MBA by a few years.

There a slew of other systems that are convincingly prior-art on all of “Apple’s” claims.

Funny, replace “Apple” with “Motorola” and I bet many opinions here would flip 180°. Seriously though, patents like this hurt everyone. In the end, Apple will meet with other companies and make an agreement that lets them share each other’s trivial patents. New companies without an extensive patent portfolio won’t have the chance to enter the market. The big guys use patents like these to keep them out through lawsuits.